Life and death revealed: Nobel Prize for Chemistry winners illuminate dark cells

Viewing life at a molecular level.

Molecules are busy actors on the cellular stage, gathering and dancing to create life and trigger death. But they had been too tiny to see in action, a frustrating scientific impasse – until three scientists, including Stanford University’s William E. Moerner, found techniques to peer deeply into cells, inventions that last week were honoured with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.